It's Damen about Damen.

Notes on metadata presentations (in general)

A general post here. Some notes on making a good online presentation. Nothing too new here, and I’ll admit there’s a thin line between “good presentation rules” and “my personal pet peeves”. I’ll also admit that I will not do half of these things next week. Treat it like Bingo: What did Damen not do that he said to do? Mark it off this list!

If you can find a way to stand during your presentation, it’s a good thing. Opens your diaphragm, allows you to move a bit, inserts some energy. Give your headphones a lot of cord, get the monitor a bit higher than usual, and give it a go.

If your slides make perfect sense to someone who hasn’t seen the presentation, then your slides are too wordy. Handouts should make sense; your script (see below) should make sense. The slides should let people know where you are in your presentation; it should possibly let them collect a central statement when they look later. Wordy slides grant the risk of making you a slide reader. Many people get frustrated when they know exactly what you’ll say before you say it for minute after minute.

Fill your slide. Bigger text if needed. More pictures. If text is small, make more slides. If text is meant to be read after the presentation, put it in your handout.

Speaking of, I believe links should go in a reference slide, if at all. If ALA didn’t have specific rules against it, I would, the next time I see a link in a presentation, run up and punch the screen, then say, “It’s broken.” Handouts are your friend, here.

Some people are script people, some aren’t. If you don’t know, then you are. The ones who aren’t are those who KNOW that, if they read a script, they might as well be saying, “Bueller? Bueller?” Then again, that might be better than your improvised behavior. Who knows?

So, there we have it. The EXIF presentation is still at the research stage. EXIF is beautifully… complex. I’m not even sure I could list all of the left-side elements in ten minutes. So I won’t.

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6 thoughts on “Notes on metadata presentations (in general)”

Well said, couldn’t agree more, will also break at least one of these rules. At LEAST one. I feel that wordy slides are more forgivable if they will be posted on Slideshare or something without accompanying context. Nobody finds it useful to download a promising slide deck only to find that half the slides just feature an image or a giant “35%” or similar (unless you’re looking to play powerpoint karaoke, in which case, score!).

Nothing about animations? I, personally, am a fan of good animation use…but “too much of a good thing” does exist, and animations slip really easily into that cliche. I can’t make any promises about standing during my presentation, but I do promise not to have metadata elements bounce across the screen. Much.

Dagnabit, I didn’t have these notes when I did my presentation. To be honest, I pretended I was in front of a class giving a presentation. I had basically memorized most of my slides and the extra notes I had written so I could sound more natural